In addition to an instrument you develop yourself, your final projects require you to include two other constructs that come from established literature.
Finding a validated instrument relevant to your topic may required a little detective work.
At a minimum, you want to find a citation for your scale, the question(s) used, and the scoring method.
Your best bet is probably going to be searching journal articles in the relevant field. Some good general search engines for academic research are:
The UMD library provides access to a ton of scholarly sources. You can access these freely any time you’re on campus.
If you’re not on campus, you can use the UMD reload button to redirect your request through the library proxy.
Academic articles tend to have a relatively consistent structure. You don’t need to read the whole thing to get useful information.
For our purposes here, the “methods” and “literature review” sections are probably the most important components.
The critical component is the citation for the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale.
This is the original citation for the scale they’re using, so you would want to track down this article for yourself.
If the questions are available, you’ll often find them listed in the appendix at the end, or in the supplementary materials, or with a link to a webpage.
In this article, the questions used are listed in the appendix.
Have there been additional validation studies?
Widely used scales might have been subjected to multiple validation studies to examine how well they work and what they measure
Evidence of construct validity comes from examining how well this measure correlates with other things that should be associated with social media addiction.
(The abstract says these are “pooled” because they’re based on a weighted average of multiple studies.)
Test-retest reliability is an indication of how closely responses correlate between follow-ups.
(There weren’t enough papers to quantitatively evaluate this)
UMD library guide for psychology majors on finding tests and assessments.
The Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences hosts an excellent open-access repository for m measurement instruments along with citations and validation information. Note that some of these are not available in English.
What scale or scale(s) are available?
Are the items accessible? Are there multiple versions? How many questions and how are they scored?
Are there additional validation studies? Can you find discussions about the reliability or dimensionality of the measure?
Is the scale widely used? Are there important criticisms or limitations mentioned? Is there a debate that warrants consideration? Competing measures?